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Deported to torture

A briefcase full of school photographs is almost all that remains of the Benhmuda family&rsquo;s eight years in Canada. For the children, it holds a lifetime of memories

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Deported back to Libya after living in their Toronto area home for eight years with his wife and four children, Adel Benhmuda, 44, wife Aisha and son Mohamed, 16, talk about their hopes of returning to Canada.(BERNARD WEIL/TORONTO STAR)

By Sandro ContentaFeature Writer

Fri., June 17, 2011

ST. PAUL’S BAY, MALTA—A briefcase full of school photographs is almost all that remains of the Benhmuda family’s eight years in Canada. For the children, it holds a lifetime of memories

“This was the best teacher ever — she was so nice,” says Moawiya, 14, pointing to the teacher in his Grade 6 classroom picture from Mississauga’s Springfield Public School.

His younger brother Adam is gently coaxed by his mother into reading a certificate he received in kindergarten, applauding him for “always being kind and respectful and being a super reader!” Adam’s eyes fill with pride.

In no time, the four Benhmuda brothers — aged 16 to 8 — are chattering about the toboggan hill at Erindale Park, the crabapple trees they used to climb, a school trip to Algonguin Park and their Guitar Hero game which, like so much else, they were forced to leave behind.

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The memories aren’t all good. The country the Benhmudas love is also the country that rejected them as refugees. In 2008, the Canadian government deported the family back to Libya — even though the two youngest boys, Adam and Omar, are Canadian citizens by birth.

For the boys’ father, it meant being deported to torture.

Adel Benhmuda, now 43, says he was detained on arrival at Tripoli’s airport and taken to the notorious Ain Zara prison on the outskirts of the Libyan capital. For a total of six months, during two separate periods of detention, he says he was repeatedly beaten.

Guards would drag him from his dark cell to a nearby room. “It’s time for your meal,” they’d tell him. They would bind his bare feet, string them up in the air and beat the soles with batons and thick electrical wires. At first it happened daily. Later, it slowed to a twice weekly ritual.

Sometimes they’d accuse him of having shamed Libya by applying for refugee status in Canada. Most times they’d just laugh and thrash. Dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s security forces have rarely needed an excuse to torture.

Benhmuda is as mild-mannered as they come. He works hard, given the chance, and juggled two jobs in Canada. But he’s also a religious fatalist, and that makes him more disappointed than bitter about his ordeal.

“It’s my life, and it has been written in advance in God’s book,” says Benhmuda, a Muslim. “That’s what I believe. I’m not lucky in these things.”

Yet his anger is apparent when he describes how Canadian officials deported him, his wife, Aisha Benmatug, and their four boys. First, they concluded it was safe to return the Benhmudas to Libya, a country long known for its atrocious human rights record, a country Canadian and NATO warplanes now bomb to get rid of Gadhafi.

Then they refused to let the Benhmudas carry their own passports and case file. They gave the documents to the crew of the commercial airline, and the crew handed them to Libyan authorities on arrival in Tripoli. It was like waving a red flag.

After 18 months of torture, harassment and grief, the Benhmudas bribed their way out of Libya on a roundabout journey that eventually landed them in Malta.

On the Mediterranean island, they spent nine months living in a cargo container in a refugee camp. Malta granted them refugee status, and in February, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees formally asked Canada to resettle the Benhmudas.

But Canadian immigration authorities seem reluctant, suggesting in one email that they owe the family nothing. The Benhmudas have seen that attitude from Canadian authorities before.

“They killed us from the inside,” says Aisha.

Libya

In 1985, Adel Benhmuda graduated from high school and went to work in his father’s optician shop in downtown Tripoli. Seven years later, his family arranged his marriage to Aisha. They honeymooned in Malta, Italy, Spain and the Canary Islands. Later, they bought a house and a car, and had two children, Mohamed and Moawiya.

The trouble began in 1990 when Benhmuda’s younger brother, Abu Baker, suddenly fled the country. Benhmuda knew his brother hated the Gadhafi regime. But he insists he learned only years later that Abu Baker belonged to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an anti-Gadhafi organization that officially joined Al Qaeda in 2007 before cutting off ties two years later.

LIFG members are now represented in the Transitional National Council, which is leading the revolt against Gadhafi, council head Mahmoud Jibril recently told The Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Canada joined several European countries in officially recognizing the council.

Between 1990 and 2000, Benhmuda says, Libya’s secret police interrogated him and his father “10 to 15 times.” Sometimes they’d order them to appear for questioning; other times, they’d pick him up.

The interrogations would last about two hours. Police would shout, curse and slap, Benhmuda says. They wanted to know his brother’s whereabouts and demanded information about his brother’s friends. He told them he knew nothing.

Abu Baker eventually contacted his family, and Benhmuda met him in Jordan in 1998. He was interrogated on his return but denied having met his brother.

A year or so later, Benhmuda learned that Jordan had deported his brother and several other men back to Tripoli. He says the interrogations became more intense from the day Abu Baker was sent to prison, where he spent a decade. (He was released in 2009, when leaders of the LIFG renounced Al Qaeda and laid down their arms.) On one occasion, Benhmuda says, secret police took him from his store, forced him to lie on the floor of the back seat of a car, and took him away.

Benhmuda decided it was time to flee. He paid a smuggler about $2,000 for student visas to Canada, issued from the Canadian embassy in Tunisia. He sold his home and car, and on July 4, 2000, flew his family to Toronto, claiming refugee status upon arrival at Pearson airport.

Canada

The family arrived with three suitcases and $37,000 in cash. Another $20,000, the final installment from the sale of their house, arrived later.

Eight months later, Benhmuda landed his first full-time job at Discount Optical in Toronto’s west end. In a letter to immigration officials supporting Benhmuda’s return to Canada, the shop’s general manager describes him as “one of my best employees.”

In 2003 Benhmuda left the shop for a higher salary as a truck driver. Three years later, he was back working at the optical lab by day and driving a truck at night.

The family spent five years in a rented townhouse in Mississauga, on The Credit Woodlands, near Erindale Park. Aisha gave birth to two more children — Omar in October 2000 and Adam in July 2002.

Adam suffers from asthma and Moawiya from muscular dystrophy. Both were under regular medical care. Moawiya was identified as a special-needs student and got extra support in school.

“Our life was like Canadians — my husband was working two jobs, I was volunteering at the school for two years, we pay tax, we have a car, we have insurance,” says Aisha, now 40. “And we didn’t have any problems; we didn’t have any bad record.”

Kindergarten teacher Ingrid Kerrigan taught Aisha’s younger boys and knew their mother and father well. In a letter to immigration minister Jason Kenney pleading for the family’s return, she describes them as devoted and hard-working parents.

“You have a family who proved themselves to be contributing, law-abiding, moral, integral members of our society,” Kerrigan wrote. “Their bills were paid, they established stable employment and housing, and they were raising four boys with good solid values.”

The immigration ministry’s lawyer kicked off the proceedings months earlier by invoking Article 1F of the 1951 international convention on refugees. It excludes from obtaining refugee status anyone who, among other things, has committed “a crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity.”

The ruling doesn’t say what the ministry suspected. It makes clear Benhmuda was questioned about his brother’s militant group, and that, in the end, Article 1F did not apply.

“In her oral submission the Minister’s counsel stated that the results of her examination of the claimant were inconclusive, as the claimant did not demonstrate sufficient knowledge about the organization known as the Al Jamaat Al-Islamiya, suspected of having links with Al Qaeda,” the adjudicators wrote, citing the group’s Arabic name.

The central issue, the board ruled, was credibility. “The panel does not believe that the male claimant was ever interrogated,” the ruling says.

The adjudicators noted Benhmuda had travelled to several European countries during the decade he claimed he was being interrogated. The fact he didn’t ask for asylum in one of those countries “indicate(s) a lack of subjective fear of persecution and further compromises the claimant’s credibility,” they wrote.

It is “implausible” that Benhmuda would travel to meet his brother in Jordan in 1998 if he had previously been interrogated, the adjudicators added. They also argued the family would not have been issued travel documents if they were wanted by Libyan authorities, or been permitted to leave the country.

They were silent about the fact that in a country like Libya, bribes are a common way of getting things done.

The most baffling part of the ruling is the conclusion that Benhmuda “does not have the profile to make him of interest to (Libyan) authorities” because his family did not belong to a political group and was not involved in political activity. Yet there is evidence that Libyan authorities suspected Benhmuda’s brother of being part of a group dedicated to overthrowing Gadhafi’s regime.

The ruling, curiously, says nothing about the imprisonment of Benhmuda’s brother. But the board had evidence as early as 2001 from a human rights report suggesting that was the case.

Avi Sirlin, the Benhmuda’s lawyer at the time, believes the ministry’s initial attempt to suggest a security risk under Article 1F made the case “an uphill battle.

“When the minister’s office intervenes in cases, it tends to heighten the board’s interest and sensitivities and often makes it harder to succeed with the claim,” says Sirlin, who is now retired.

From January 2006 to December 2010, 35 refugee claimants were deported to Libya.

The Benhmudas were devastated by their claim’s rejection.

In June, 2008, a “pre-removal risk assessment” by the immigration department concluded the Benhmudas did not risk persecution or torture if deported to Gadhafi’s Libya. The decision was read to the family in an office near Pearson airport. Eldest sons Mohamed and Moawiya slid to the floor and cried.

The written decision, signed by risk assessment officer A. Dello, notes a letter from Benhmuda’s father, warning of the torture his son faced if deported. Dello describes the father as biased and unqualified to judge.

Dello also had a summons from the Libyan government, dated Sept. 13, 2004, ordering Benhmuda to appear at a police station.

“I give the summons minimal weight as it is very general and does not identify the reasons he is required to report to the police station,” Dello wrote, adding that being summoned to a Libyan police station doesn’t amount to risk of persecution.

Dello then gave “no weight” to two statements written by the Swiss-based Libyan Committee of Truth and Justice, one on the abuse of political prisoners in Libya and the other on the imprisonment of Benhmuda’s brother.

Benhmuda could have appealed the risk assessment decision to Federal Court and filed a request to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. He didn’t do either. After eight years, he says, he was out of funds, energy and hope. Besides, Libya and Canada had taught him that life was Kafkaesque.

“With police and governments, there is nobody to blame, nobody to talk to,” he says.

He also assumed politics was working against him. In 2004, then-Prime Minister Paul Martin had followed other Western leaders to Tripoli to congratulate Gadhafi — until then an international pariah — for giving up his nuclear bomb program, and to forge business links.

Benhmuda says the Canadian Border Services Agency gave the family three weeks to leave Canada.

“Imagine, eight years collecting your life’s needs — furniture, clothes, toys, everything for your family. And then they say, ‘You have to leave in three weeks.’ Oh my.”

They sold or discarded most of what they owned.

“All our memories for our entire life were just being thrown away like they were nothing,” Mohamed says.

Libya

The family landed in Tripoli on Aug. 12, 2008. Their passports were seized. Benhmuda was detained, and for four months Aisha received no official word of her husband.

“During the first few days, (Benhmuda) was beaten every day,” according to the UNHCR’s February request for resettlement to Canadian authorities, which cites the whipping of his feet.

When they were done, Benhmuda says, he would steady himself against walls while painfully walking back to his cell. It was a small hole of a place, sometimes crowded with three other inmates sleeping on dirty mattresses and sharing a bucket for a toilet.

His torturers demanded the names of Libyans living in Canada, and Benhmuda gave those he knew. He feared he would be killed. “To them, you’re just an insect,” he says.

He was released at the end of December. Days later, police returned the passports of his wife and sons, but not Benhmuda’s.

He went back to his father’s optical shop, but with two of his eight siblings already employed there, work was sporadic. His sons were not accepted in public schools, ostensibly because the boys didn’t speak Arabic. Aisha sold family gold to pay for private school tuition.

The family camped out at the homes of relatives until June 2009, when they ended up in the apartment of Aisha’s newly divorced brother. But because of a law that awards residences to divorced women, police roughly ejected the Benhmudas.

Benhmuda says he found himself back in Ain Zara prison, with the same prison guards and two more months of torture.

By December, a freed Benhmuda was out of work and the children were out of school. The family could no longer afford tuition at the private school they attended. “No school, no job, no home,” Aisha says.

Benhmuda decided it was time, once again, to get out.

The family sold more gold and paid $8,000 to a relative with a contact in the police force. He got them Benhmuda’s passport and visas for travel to Europe.

Benhmuda says he learned from the Internet that Sweden didn’t deport Libyan asylum seekers. The relative he paid guided the family through the airport and onto the plane. On Jan. 21, 2010, he and his family landed in Stockholm with 12 suitcases. They had paid for the excess baggage.

Altogether, the family spent just six months in Sweden. They had entered the country with a European visa issued by the Maltese embassy in Tripoli. Swedish authorities told them that meant they would have to apply for asylum in Malta. Benhmuda was detained for 17 days, and the family was issued a deportation order.

Baggage restrictions forced them to dump half their possessions. They travelled with six suitcases.

“We lost everything, again,” Aisha says.

Malta

They landed in Malta on May 27, 2010 and claimed asylum. They were taken to the Hal Far Tent Village, a camp crowded with more than 600 migrants and asylum seekers near the island’s international airport, south of the capital city, Valletta.

The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees has called Hal Far “Europe’s only official tent camp for migrants and refugees.” Services are sparse. People sleep in bunk beds inside sweltering cargo containers or tents — one tent the Star visited was crowded with 24 men.

The Benhmudas were assigned to a 40-foot cargo container with no washroom, no water, no appliances and no furniture. All it had was beds, blankets and pillows.

“I said, ‘This is a container for tuna, not for people,’” Aisha says.

They were the only family at the camp. Omar, who was 9 at the time, cried constantly. “I have never seen rats that big,” Aisha recalls. “The cats were afraid of the rats.”

She got in the habit of walking by the airport runway and screaming at the top of her lungs as planes roared to a landing. She says it made her feel better.

They spent nine months in the camp.

On Aug. 21, the Maltese Refugee Commission granted them refugee status. Unless renewed, it expires in August 2013. They receive about $1,160 a month in support payments from the Maltese government.

In February, they moved to a furnished two-bedroom apartment in St. Paul’s Bay, a town with low-end tourist resorts in Malta’s north. They pay $355 a month, plus utilities.

The four boys sleep on mattresses on the floor in one room. There’s mould at the base of the walls and on items packed in dressers. Adam, the youngest, suffers from asthma and spent a couple of days in hospital recently when it flared up.

Benhmuda hasn’t been able to find a job. Construction work is available, but he says his diabetes and high blood pressure rule that out. He believes he missed out on at least one job because of xenophobia.

Three of the boys are in public school, struggling to learn Maltese. Mohamed is being home-schooled by a family friend and expects to enter high school this fall.

In September 2010, the Benhmudas’ Toronto lawyer, Andrew Brouwer, asked Canadian immigration officials to allow the family back into the country on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Brouwer argues the Canadian government effectively deported two Canadian citizens —Omar and Adam — “to one of the most repressive countries on the planet,” forcing them to deal with the traumatic arrest and torture of their father.

“No child should ever be deported to such danger and insecurity,” Brouwer says — let alone Canadian citizens.

A November summary of the case by a senior immigration official — obtained by Brouwer through a freedom of information request — ended with a section entitled “anticipatory media lines.” Among the points made is that Canada has a fair refugee process that thoroughly reviews cases and provides for appeals at every step. The Benhmuda family were rejected and therefore had to leave. In such cases, Canadian children “can get caught in the middle,” the media lines say.

“Many children are born in Canada to foreign nationals every year, but that does not mean they automatically go to the front of the queue, much less that they are automatically granted permanent resident status,” the note adds. “That would not be fair to the hundreds of thousands of others who want to come to Canada and are following the rules.”

But Brouwer says immigration officials also told him the request for return would be considered if it was made through the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR filed a 17-page request in February. It describes the family’s ordeal, its medical needs and Libya’s atrocious human rights record. Brouwer has also forwarded a letter from the Benhmudas’ former manager at Discount Optical, promising Benhmuda a full time job at $12 an hour.

The immigration department referred the UNHCR request to officials in Canada’s embassy in Rome. The reaction so far doesn’t give the Benhmudas much hope.

Brouwer has obtained, also through a freedom of information request, a March 21 email from Laurent Beaulieu, the embassy’s immigration counsellor. Beaulieu wrote he finds it “odd” that UNHCR would make the Benhmudas a priority when they’ve already been resettled by Maltese authorities and “there are so many other urgent cases due to the crisis in the Magreb . . .

“I do not see what is Canada’s obligation in this case, they were heard and the applicant received the attention they deserved,” Beaulieu wrote.

Beaulieu makes no mention of the torture Benhmuda endured.

“Since the (refugee) claim was already heard in Canada (I) do not see what mechanism we have here to re-hear yet again (the) same claim,” Beaulieu wrote.

“Also am concerned for the precedent being set, since the applicant has been resettled by the Maltese authorities, why are we giving the impression that we are willing to take refugees resettled in safe countries and resettle them in Canada,” Beaulieu added, before asking Ottawa officials for advice on how to proceed.

The UNHCR request makes clear, however, that Malta — which has long had close ties with Libya — doesn’t feel all that safe to those fleeing Gadhafi’s regime. The UNHCR describes the island of 400,000 as under increasing pressure from African migrants and refugees landing on its shores. The country has no refugee integration policy, and racism creates “an environment of fear, tension and mistrust.”

The UNHCR has been resettling Malta refugees in other countries since 2007. The agency refers 500 people a year to the U.S. government for resettlement, and 255 were relocated in other European countries last year.

The UNHCR request ends by reminding the Canadian government of the Canadian citizenship of Omar and Adam, “as well as the whole family’s close links with Canada.”

Aisha sees those links in the constant longing of her children for a lost home.

“In Canada, they talk about human rights and freedom and how you can’t hit your kids — all those things,” Aisha says. “But they do not care if they break your dreams and your hopes. These are things that will not get fixed.”

“Nobody took a few minutes to look at our children, to look (at) how good they are in school, to look (at) how good they are in Canada,” she adds. “They protect the children, their bodies, but not their insides.”

Life in Malta’s tent village: ‘The cats were afraid of the rats’

Malta’s Hal Far Tent Village is filled with more than 600 migrants and refugees from Africa like Sulaman, above, a refugee since 2008 who says he spends his time reading the Koran. Some fled the conflict in Libya, making the dangerous trip in overcrowded boats. The European Union’s human rights commissioner recently denounced the “totally inadequate” living conditions at the camp and called for it to be closed. Eritrean Benjamin Maharena, lower left, was working in Tripoli when the Libyan conflict broke out. He paid smugglers $700 for a crowded boat ride to Malta on March 29. Maharena now shares a sweltering tent with 23 other men. “They call this Europe? Where is Europe? Africa is better than this,” says Maharena, 22. “Even the dogs don’t want to live here.” The camp’s residents live in 50 tents and 20 shipping containers. Adel Benhmuda, lower right, arrived in 2010, after Canada deported him as a failed refugee to Libya, where he says he was tortured. Benhmuda, his wife, and four children were placed in one of the shipping containers. The only furniture was beds. The toilet was in a building 50 metres away. They lived there nine months. “I have never seen rats that big,” says Benhmuda’s wife, Aisha. “The cats were afraid of the rats.”

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